My efforts normally paid off with Elle though. It would be a stretch to describe her as bubbly and I hate the word vivacious, but her infectious energy was hard to ignore normally. She’d been all of seven when Nora disappeared and, in some ways, I think her youth had shielded her from the worst of it. Sometimes I wonder if it would have been easier—better—if it had happened when we were all younger. Or older. There’s something about seventeen, those soft teenage years when you think you’re made of sterner stuff but are really still filled with cotton wool. It imprinted itself so hard, so firmly into and on to me because I was so malleable, so yielding. At seventeen you think you’re done, fully formed; but really you’ve barely even got started. It was like a handprint in wet concrete pushed in at just the right moment and then made permanent.
“You talking about Jenna Fairfax?” Leo asked, and Elle nodded.
“How do you know Jenna?” I asked.
“I’ve been coaching the hockey team for a while now. Me and Bright. Fairfax is one of our best players. On the girls’ team, I mean.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Of course.”
“Elle’s getting pretty good too these days. Most elegant player on the ice what with all that figure skating,” Leo said.
Elle’s face seemed to pale even further, and her lips pulled back in a grimace as if she was about to speak before she stopped herself.
“Elle, you OK?” I asked.
“Actually I’m feeling a little sick. I might go upstairs and lie down.”
“Okay,” I said, watching as she placed her glass of water on the coffee table and pushed through the crowd to the staircase.
“She’s taking this pretty hard, huh?” Leo said.
“I don’t know. Maybe she’s really just not feeling well.”
“What about you?”
“You’d think I’d be used to it by now,” I said.
“It’s a rough thing to have to get used to, Mads.”
I shook my head, not disagreeing with him, just trying to shake something loose. To get to the root of what made it all feel so disturbingly empty. “It’s just not getting any easier. Sometimes I wish we’d stop with all the commemorations and memorials. It’s not like any of us have to be reminded, right? It’s like we’re trying to prove something, but what are we proving? Look around, there’s what, sixteen, seventeen people here?” I was talking in a strained rush, my voice low and jagged, and Leo had to step towards me to hear properly. “What good does this do any of us? All I see is us getting older and Nora staying the same.”
Leo’s brow was furrowed as he leaned over me, his hand stretching out to rest warmly on my shoulder; but someone behind me spoke before Leo had a chance to answer.
“You can go home whenever you want, Mads. No one’s keeping you from leaving,” Nate said, his voice stripped of emotion, warmth.
My hands tightened around my mug of coffee which had started to go cold. “That’s not what I meant. I want to be here; I just wish we didn’t have to be.”
“That’s not what I heard.”
“Well, maybe you shouldn’t have been eavesdropping.”
Nate’s jaw clenched as his gaze shifted almost imperceptibly so that he was now staring just to the left of my face.
“All I’m saying is, I wish one goodbye was enough. Or I wish we even got a goodbye. But we don’t even get that luxury, so we have to keep saying goodbye over and over and over again and it just feels less and less real the more that time passes,” I said in a rush.
“It’s been ten years. You think we should have just ignored that? Why’d you even come if you were so violently opposed to the idea of a ten-year memorial?”
“I’m not ‘violently opposed.’ I’m tired I guess. I’m just really, really tired.”
“Well, then I’d suggest you go home and get some rest, Mads. Get some beauty sleep.”
I couldn’t remember when or why things had got so bad between me and Nate. One day he was the person I called when I couldn’t call anyone else, and the next—well, I couldn’t even tell you. He’d simply stopped returning my calls and eventually I’d stopped making them. But he’d never spoken to me like that, with such open hostility I could feel it pounding off him, such shortness that his words threw me so much I literally stepped backwards and onto Leo’s foot.
But Nate didn’t stick around to hear my response, even if I’d been able to somehow stumble across one; he simply slipped past me and into the crowd, joining his mother in the kitchen.
It could have been a concerned comment, I suppose, something sincere and almost loving, “go home, get some sleep.” But it wasn’t and the sudden realization of how little he thought of me then roared in my ears, drowning out everything else.
It took me a while to realize Leo was talking to me, saying something soothing but ultimately meaningless: How difficult this was for Nate, how he’d been having a hard time, how difficult today was for everyone. I didn’t need Leo to tell me any of that; I knew it all already, implicitly. It was in evidence everywhere you looked in that room, and it lived inside me that day just as it did every day, but casual cruelty had never been a part of my relationship with Nate, had never formed an integral part of our language. If our silences had no give to them anymore, then neither did our words. They were brittle, ready to break at the slightest of touches.
I tried to think back to when Nate was the person I rang in the middle of the night, to when his voice was the only thing I could bear to listen to. Just like everything else then it felt so long ago, a lifetime ago. It had been years since I’d seen his name flash across the screen of my phone and, just as with Nora, my relationship to him had gradually been reduced to snowy memorials, stuffy rooms, and stilted small talk.
I took a sip of coffee, while Leo talked at me, and balked at its temperature. Depositing the mug on the coffee table I made my excuses to Leo and headed towards Ange, who was standing on the edge of a conversation between a variety of parents, not joining in. Her eyes were glazed as she drank her coffee and she failed to notice me as I approached.
“Hey,” I said, shaking her out of her reverie, “when are you heading off?”
Ange looked at me and shrugged. “Probably in twenty minutes or so, I guess?”
“No, I mean when are you heading back home to Madison?”
“Oh, not till tomorrow morning. I’m meant to be having dinner with my parents tonight.”
“I can still drive back with you, right?”
“Yeah, of course. So, have you talked to Nate yet? How’s he doing?”
“He told me I should go home to catch up on my beauty sleep,” I said while reaching for Ange’s coffee cup and taking a sip.
“Wow. How caring of him. When did you guys last speak?”
“Last year’s memorial, I guess? Definitely haven’t heard from him since then. I’m trying to work out what I did to offend him so badly, but I think it might just be my very presence.” I tried to make my voice sound light, indifferent, but failed. The truth was, I really was trying to figure out what I’d done, where it had all gone so horribly wrong.
Ange made a face at me, grabbing back her coffee.